Edition Four — on where India’s next big ideas are really coming from
In a school in West Bengal, a teenager built a company around menstrual health. In Patna, three students tackled the arsenic in their own groundwater and turned it into a water-tech venture. Not in Bengaluru. Not in Gurugram. In the places where the problem actually lived.
I came across these stories in a fine piece by Sang pil Chun, a corporate vice-president at Samsung Electronics Southwest Asia, in the The Economic Times on the boom of big ideas in small towns. It got me thinking — because it names something I have watched, from the other side of the table, for thirty years.
• •
For most of my career, India ran on a quiet, unspoken assumption: that ideas, talent, and ambition had a pin code. That if you were serious about building something, you went to a handful of cities — Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Gurugram — because that was where the mentors were, the money was, the validation was. Everyone else waited their turn, or packed a bag.
Here is the thing, though. The talent was never concentrated in those cities. Only the access was. The brilliant young person in Patna or Durgapur or Kolhapur always existed. What she lacked was not ability — it was a way in. A mentor to call. An investor who would take the meeting. A market she could reach without first moving a thousand kilometres away from everyone she knew.
That is what has changed. And it has changed faster than most people at the top have noticed.
• •
Look at what has quietly happened. India has gone from a few hundred recognised startups in 2016 to more than two lakh today. And the headline is not the number — it is the map. Nearly half of them are now being built outside the metros, across hundreds of districts that a decade ago barely featured in the story at all.
The scaffolding arrived. Cheap smartphones, digital payments, high-speed internet, online learning, thousands of tinkering labs and incubators reaching students in small towns rather than only university graduates in big ones. Suddenly a founder in a tier-three town can find a mentor, raise capital, and reach a national market without relocating. The moat that the metros quietly enjoyed — not talent, but access — has been drained.
And notice what these young people are building. Not copies of what Bengaluru is building. Solutions to the problems in front of them — arsenic in the water, health with no diagnosis nearby, livelihoods that a distant lab would never think to design for. Their distance from the metros is not a handicap. It is the source of the idea. They are closest to the problem, and that is the one advantage no amount of funding can manufacture.
• •
This is the part I want the older, more powerful half of the room to sit with
The chairmen, the investors, the policymakers who still, half-consciously, look for the next big thing in the same four cities.
The map has moved. The country that leads in innovation over the coming decades will not be the one that produces the most technology. It will be the one that can draw ideas from the widest possible base of its people — a student in Patna given the same shot as one in Powai. Geography defined India’s first startup wave. It does not have to define the next one.
And to the young person reading this from a town that never gets mentioned: the old rule is gone. You no longer have to leave home to be taken seriously. The mentor, the capital, the market — they will reach you now. What you have that the metro does not is proximity to a real problem worth solving. Build from where you are. Your postcode was never the thing holding you back — and today, it decides nothing at all.
What are you waiting for — permission, or a move to a bigger city — to begin?
— Nitin
• •
Connecting Dots — every fortnight, I take a deal, a policy, or a person and tell you the thinking behind it. Insights and instincts.
I’m a corporate and M&A lawyer in Mumbai. For three decades I’ve advised global companies and their boards on coming into India, on joint ventures, and on mergers and acquisitions, and I still do. Busy as that keeps me, I always make time for younger professionals — through this letter, and through my conversations with law students — because staying close to young minds keeps me learning. If something here struck a chord, write back. I read every reply | nitin@nitinpotdar.com